Most of my views on drugs and substances are formed, unfortunately, due to history and invalid perceptions of their users and those who appear to support their legality most visibly. I was surprised to find the truth about acid at least a little further to the side of “safe and useful” than my longtime estimation. This opens up a possibility for an attempt at recreational and introspectively therapeutic use, if only as an experiment.
My greatest concern would be that I would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual, or some other nonsense. That I would end up sacrificing a lot of epistemic rationality for some of the instrumental variety, or perhaps a loss of both in favor of living off of some big, new, and imaginary life changing experience.
In short, I’m comfortable with recent life changes and recent introspection, and I wonder whether I should expect a trip to reinforce and categorize those positive experiences, or else replace them with something farce.
Also I should ask about any other health dangers, or even other non-obvious benefits.
One data point here. I’ve taken a few low-to-lowish dose trips. I’m still the same skeptic/pragmatist I was.
When I’d see the walls billowing and more detail generating out of visual details, I didn’t think “The universe is alive!” I thought “my visual system is alive”.
I did have an experience which—to the extent I could put it into words—was that my sense of reality was something being generated. However, it didn’t go very deep—it didn’t have aftereffects that I can see. I’m not convinced it was false, and it might be worth exploring to see what’s going on with my sense of reality.
I won’t be able to do it justice in words, but I like to try.
If you value your current makeup as a “rationalist”—LSD will not necessarily help with that. Whatever your current worldview, it is not “the truth”, it is constructed, and it will not be the same after you come down.
You can’t expect a trip to do anything in particular, except maybe blow your mind. A trip is like finding out you were adopted. It’s discovering a secret hidden in plain sight. It’s waking up to realize you’ve never been awake before—you were only dreaming you were awake. It’s finding out that everything familiar, everything you took for granted, was something else all along, and you had no idea.
No matter how much you’ve invested in the identity of “rationalist”, no matter how much science you’ve read… Even if you know how many stars there are in the visible universe, and how many atoms. Even if you’ve cultivated a sense for numbers like that, real reality is so much bigger than whatever your perception of it is. I don’t know how acid works, but it seems to open you in a way that lets more of everything in. More light. More information. Reality is not what you think it is. Reality is reality. Acid may not be able to show you reality, but it can viscerally drive home that difference. It can show you that you’ve been living in your mind all your life, and mistaking it for reality.
It will also change your sense of self. You may find that your self-concept is like a mirage. You may experience ego-loss, which is like becoming nobody and nothing in particular, only immediate sensory awareness and thought, unconnected to what you think of as you, the person.
I don’t know about health dangers. I never experienced any. Tripping does permanently change the way you view the world. It’s a special case of seeing something you can’t un-see. Whether it’s a “benefit” … depends a lot on what you want.
(Created an alternative username for replying to this because I don’t want to associate my LSD use with my real name.)
I’d just like to add a contrary datapoint—I had a one pretty intense trip that you might describe as “fucking weird”, which was certainly mind-blowing in a sense. My sense of time transformed stopped being linear and started feeling like it was a labyrinth that I could walk in, I alternatively perceived the other people in the room as being real separate people or as parts of my own subconsciousness, and at one point it felt like my unity of consciousness shattered into a thousand different strands of thought which I could perceive as complex geometric visualizations...
But afterwards, it didn’t particularly feel like I’d have learned anything. It was a weird and cool experience, but that was it. You say that one’s worldview won’t be the same after coming down, but I don’t feel like the trip changed anything. At most it might’ve given me some mildly interesting hypotheses about the way the brain might work.
I’m guessing that the main reason for this might be that I already thought of my reality as being essentially constructed by my brain. Tripping did confirm that a bit, but then I never had serious doubts about it in the first place.
I don’t think describing the experience itself is very helpful to answering the question.. The comment seems as close to an answer of “yes, it’s likely you would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual or some other nonsense” as someone would actually give, but because of the vagueness that seems to be intrinsic to descriptions of the experience of a trip, I’m not even sure if you’re espousing such things or not.
In my experience, it is possible to bring parts of the experience back and subject it to analytical and critical thinking, but it is very challenging. The trip does tend to defy comprehension by the normal mode of consciousness, which is why descriptions have the quality you call “vagueness”. In short, distilling more than “irreducibly spiritual nonsense” from the trip takes work, not unlike the work of organizing thoughts into a term paper. It can be done, and the more analytical your habits of thought to begin with, the more success I think you could expect.
I don’t imbibe (for that matter, pretty much anything stronger than caffeine), so I can’t offer any information about the experience of its affects on rationality.
From the literature, it has a relatively high ratio of activity threshold to lethal dose (even assuming the lowest supported toxic doses), but that usually doesn’t include behavior toxicity. Supervision is strongly recommended. There’s some evidence that psychoactive drugs (even weakly psychoactive drugs like marijuana) can aggravate preexisting conditions or even trigger latent conditions like depression, schizophrenia, and schizoid personality disorder.
Another data point here. I’ve done LSD a couple of times, and didn’t find the experience “spiritual” at all.
The experience was mostly visual: illusion of movement in static objects when eyes open, and intense visualization when eyes closed. It’s hard to describe these images, but it felt like my visual cortex was overstimulated and randomly generated geometric patterns intertwined with visual memories and newly generated constructs and sceneries. This all happened while travelling through a fractal-like pattern, so I felt the word “trip” was quite fitting. The trip didn’t seem to affect my thinking much during or after.
I can see why a susceptible (irrational) mind could find this chemical alteration of consciousness a godly revelation, but I can’t imagine taking the stuff for anything else than entertainment purposes. A couple of friends of mine had similar experiences.
LSD is known to cause persistent psychosis, apparently in people who already have latent or diagnosed mental health problems. This is what they teach in my med school, but the epidemiology of the phenomenom was left vague.
Now that I think about it, I felt quite elated too. Could have been just the novel experience though, hard to say. Some other emotions perhaps intensified too, but I wasn’t interested in exploring that venue.
The visual system is very complicated, and many different classes of drugs can cause hallucinations in different ways without the overall experience being similar.
Ketamine and LSD do not have similar mechanisms in the brain, nor (from what I’ve read) are their effects qualitatively similar. LSD is a psychedelic acting as an agonist on 5-HT_2A receptors (among other things, but that’s what it shares in common with other classic psychedelics. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic acting as an antagonist on NMDA receptors. LSD is, however, effective against migraines at sub-hallucinogenic doses.
Is LSD like a thing?
Most of my views on drugs and substances are formed, unfortunately, due to history and invalid perceptions of their users and those who appear to support their legality most visibly. I was surprised to find the truth about acid at least a little further to the side of “safe and useful” than my longtime estimation. This opens up a possibility for an attempt at recreational and introspectively therapeutic use, if only as an experiment.
My greatest concern would be that I would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual, or some other nonsense. That I would end up sacrificing a lot of epistemic rationality for some of the instrumental variety, or perhaps a loss of both in favor of living off of some big, new, and imaginary life changing experience.
In short, I’m comfortable with recent life changes and recent introspection, and I wonder whether I should expect a trip to reinforce and categorize those positive experiences, or else replace them with something farce.
Also I should ask about any other health dangers, or even other non-obvious benefits.
One data point here. I’ve taken a few low-to-lowish dose trips. I’m still the same skeptic/pragmatist I was.
When I’d see the walls billowing and more detail generating out of visual details, I didn’t think “The universe is alive!” I thought “my visual system is alive”.
I did have an experience which—to the extent I could put it into words—was that my sense of reality was something being generated. However, it didn’t go very deep—it didn’t have aftereffects that I can see. I’m not convinced it was false, and it might be worth exploring to see what’s going on with my sense of reality.
I won’t be able to do it justice in words, but I like to try.
If you value your current makeup as a “rationalist”—LSD will not necessarily help with that. Whatever your current worldview, it is not “the truth”, it is constructed, and it will not be the same after you come down.
You can’t expect a trip to do anything in particular, except maybe blow your mind. A trip is like finding out you were adopted. It’s discovering a secret hidden in plain sight. It’s waking up to realize you’ve never been awake before—you were only dreaming you were awake. It’s finding out that everything familiar, everything you took for granted, was something else all along, and you had no idea.
No matter how much you’ve invested in the identity of “rationalist”, no matter how much science you’ve read… Even if you know how many stars there are in the visible universe, and how many atoms. Even if you’ve cultivated a sense for numbers like that, real reality is so much bigger than whatever your perception of it is. I don’t know how acid works, but it seems to open you in a way that lets more of everything in. More light. More information. Reality is not what you think it is. Reality is reality. Acid may not be able to show you reality, but it can viscerally drive home that difference. It can show you that you’ve been living in your mind all your life, and mistaking it for reality.
It will also change your sense of self. You may find that your self-concept is like a mirage. You may experience ego-loss, which is like becoming nobody and nothing in particular, only immediate sensory awareness and thought, unconnected to what you think of as you, the person.
I don’t know about health dangers. I never experienced any. Tripping does permanently change the way you view the world. It’s a special case of seeing something you can’t un-see. Whether it’s a “benefit” … depends a lot on what you want.
(Created an alternative username for replying to this because I don’t want to associate my LSD use with my real name.)
I’d just like to add a contrary datapoint—I had a one pretty intense trip that you might describe as “fucking weird”, which was certainly mind-blowing in a sense. My sense of time transformed stopped being linear and started feeling like it was a labyrinth that I could walk in, I alternatively perceived the other people in the room as being real separate people or as parts of my own subconsciousness, and at one point it felt like my unity of consciousness shattered into a thousand different strands of thought which I could perceive as complex geometric visualizations...
But afterwards, it didn’t particularly feel like I’d have learned anything. It was a weird and cool experience, but that was it. You say that one’s worldview won’t be the same after coming down, but I don’t feel like the trip changed anything. At most it might’ve given me some mildly interesting hypotheses about the way the brain might work.
I’m guessing that the main reason for this might be that I already thought of my reality as being essentially constructed by my brain. Tripping did confirm that a bit, but then I never had serious doubts about it in the first place.
I don’t think describing the experience itself is very helpful to answering the question.. The comment seems as close to an answer of “yes, it’s likely you would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual or some other nonsense” as someone would actually give, but because of the vagueness that seems to be intrinsic to descriptions of the experience of a trip, I’m not even sure if you’re espousing such things or not.
In my experience, it is possible to bring parts of the experience back and subject it to analytical and critical thinking, but it is very challenging. The trip does tend to defy comprehension by the normal mode of consciousness, which is why descriptions have the quality you call “vagueness”. In short, distilling more than “irreducibly spiritual nonsense” from the trip takes work, not unlike the work of organizing thoughts into a term paper. It can be done, and the more analytical your habits of thought to begin with, the more success I think you could expect.
I don’t imbibe (for that matter, pretty much anything stronger than caffeine), so I can’t offer any information about the experience of its affects on rationality.
From the literature, it has a relatively high ratio of activity threshold to lethal dose (even assuming the lowest supported toxic doses), but that usually doesn’t include behavior toxicity. Supervision is strongly recommended. There’s some evidence that psychoactive drugs (even weakly psychoactive drugs like marijuana) can aggravate preexisting conditions or even trigger latent conditions like depression, schizophrenia, and schizoid personality disorder.
Another data point here. I’ve done LSD a couple of times, and didn’t find the experience “spiritual” at all.
The experience was mostly visual: illusion of movement in static objects when eyes open, and intense visualization when eyes closed. It’s hard to describe these images, but it felt like my visual cortex was overstimulated and randomly generated geometric patterns intertwined with visual memories and newly generated constructs and sceneries. This all happened while travelling through a fractal-like pattern, so I felt the word “trip” was quite fitting. The trip didn’t seem to affect my thinking much during or after.
I can see why a susceptible (irrational) mind could find this chemical alteration of consciousness a godly revelation, but I can’t imagine taking the stuff for anything else than entertainment purposes. A couple of friends of mine had similar experiences.
LSD is known to cause persistent psychosis, apparently in people who already have latent or diagnosed mental health problems. This is what they teach in my med school, but the epidemiology of the phenomenom was left vague.
I find that LSD does have emotional effects—for me, it’s a stimulant and it tends to cheer me up.
Now that I think about it, I felt quite elated too. Could have been just the novel experience though, hard to say. Some other emotions perhaps intensified too, but I wasn’t interested in exploring that venue.
Datapoint: another halluciogen, ketamine, has been shown to effectively treat depression. Not sure if mechanisms of LSD are similar.
The visual system is very complicated, and many different classes of drugs can cause hallucinations in different ways without the overall experience being similar.
Ketamine and LSD do not have similar mechanisms in the brain, nor (from what I’ve read) are their effects qualitatively similar. LSD is a psychedelic acting as an agonist on 5-HT_2A receptors (among other things, but that’s what it shares in common with other classic psychedelics. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic acting as an antagonist on NMDA receptors. LSD is, however, effective against migraines at sub-hallucinogenic doses.